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Crime & Safety

West Hollywood Sheriff Joins Nixle Alert System

This public safety tool sends residents e-mails and texts with community-specific information on crime, traffic and events.

If you get your information from Twitter or Facebook, there's one more service you may want to add to your social media list: Nixle.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department has announced a new service for West Hollywood residents that will allow them to receive free geographic-specific e-mails and text alerts. The West Hollywood Sheriff's Station provides information within this  alert system.

Nixle is a Twitter-like service for government agencies and residents. The companies are unrelated, but follow a similar approach to providing information. The messages are 140 characters or less, with content about law enforcement warnings, community information and traffic alerts.  The Nixle emails allow up to 20,000 characters of text, plus photos and maps.

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Residents can sign up for messages about arrests, neighborhood-specific alerts and advisories, road closures, traffic incidents, wanted and missing persons and crime trends, among other things.

The first training at the West Hollywood Sheriff's Station was held the second week of July.

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Capt. Michael Parker, from the L.A. County Sheriff's Headquarters, said Nixle combines the speed of social networking with the accuracy of direct information from officials. 

"You want to get it from the credible source, which is the Sheriff's Department," he said.

Users receive localized information based on their subscription preferences. West Hollywood residents can find out what's happening within the city, without overwhelming their devices with constant messaging.

"Nixle's usage is still growing and training is ongoing," he said. "But so far results have been great, really great," he said.

Parker cited success in locating Davit Davtyan, a 26-year-old resident of West Hollywood who went missing for nearly a week this month.

Registration requires one's full name, e-mail address, geographical area, and the creation of a user name and password. Thereafter, information is disseminated by an e-mail alert or text message. 

There are four types of messaging services available, color-coded by purpose: red, yellow, green, and blue. 

The red alert messages are used for urgent information such as an Amber Alert and suspect information. The yellow advisory messages seek information about a crime and also provide information on public safety. The green messages are for community events and safety tips. And the blue messages are for major traffic events such as road closures and serious collisions. 

For a major disaster that could impact public safety, the L.A. County Sheriff's Department could override preferences to deliver a red alert, said Parker.

"Let's say there's information regarding an earthquake or fire…  [residents] would probably want those pieces of information," he said. "But that's not something that would happen very often. It would have to be a major incident."

Nixle's servers are maintained by the National Law Enforcement Telecommunications System to ensure the security of the messaging in a major disaster or attack. As a second measure to maintain the service's integrity, no marketing is included in any of the four types of alerts.

For text alerts from L.A. County Sheriff's Headquarters, residents are being asked to text "LASheriff" to 888777. Note that standard text messaging rates apply. To register for all geographically-specific LASD options, register your address at www.nixle.com

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